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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Continuous stochastic flows driven by white noise and their duals

作者:

arXiv:2606.12143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a class of continuous stochastic flows driven by a space-time white noise and characterize their dual flows by explicit stochastic differential equations. A key ingredient of the proof is the convergence of solutions under coefficient approximations. As an application, we derive the dual flows in two illustrative examples, the squared Bessel flow and the Jacobi flow. We also introduce a new model of polynomially self-repelling (PSR) flow and show that it enjoys a self-duality property.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Otters++: A Time-to-first-spike Based Energy Efficient Optical Spiking Transformer

arXiv:2606.13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once. In practice, however, this benefit is often reduced by the cost of computing a temporal decay term and multiplying it by the synaptic weight. We address this issue by turning a physical hardware "bug," the natural signal decay in optoelectronic devices, into the main computation of TTFS, named Otters++. Specifically, we use the measured decay of a custom In$_2$O$_3$ optoelectronic synapse to directly realize the TTFS temporal term, removing the need for explicit digital decay computation. To scale this idea to Transformer models, we establish a layer-wise functional equivalence between the Otters++ and a quantized neural network (QNN), and develop a hybrid training method that uses device-faithful SNN computation in the forward pass and QNN straight-through gradients through the equivalent QNN path in the backward pass, together with model distillation. This avoids differentiation through discrete first-spike events and reduces the over-sparsity problem in direct TTFS-SNN training. We further make training aware of measured device noise by sampling run-to-run variation, and refine the system-level energy model by accounting for device sharing and multi-hop communication. On GLUE dataset, Otters++ improves the average score to 84.17\% while maintaining a clear energy advantage over prior spiking Transformer baselines. These results show that physically grounded TTFS computing can be efficient, trainable, and robust under realistic hardware effects.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Improving Cross-Format Robustness in Language Models with Multi-Format Training

Large language models often remain sensitive to answer format: a question solved correctly in one form may fail in another semantically equivalent form. To study this gap, we define cross-format robustness as the extent to which a model answers the same underlying question consistently across formats. We then compare full-format training with FormatMix, which expands only a subset of training items into multiple equivalent formats using either random or targeted selection. Across GLM4 and Llama-3.1, multi-format supervision consistently improves both task performance and cross-format robustness, whereas Multiple-choice question (MCQ)-only supervision alone brings little benefit and can even reduce robustness. We further find that expanding only about 30% of the training set into multiple formats often recovers most of the gain from full-format training, and this effect appears across the model families and sizes we study. These results suggest that format diversity, rather than additional supervision alone, is the key driver of robustness. That lightweight multi-format augmentation is a practical way to make LLMs less sensitive to answer format without changing the base model.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Hyperlipidemia Pharmacotherapy in Skilled Nursing Facilities: A Real-World Evidence Study

Objectives: To estimate hyperlipidemia medication order prevalence and associated variables in U.S. skilled nursing facility (SNF) residents. Design: Retrospective, observational study. Setting and Participants: Electronic Health Record data from 447,080 SNF residents with a hyperlipidemia diagnosis identified in PointClickCare's Life Sciences clinical database (January-April 2025) were reviewed. Methods: The presence and absence of medication orders for hyperlipidemia treatments recommended by the American Heart Association were assessed. Descriptive analyses summarized demographic and clinical characteristics, and a modified Poisson regression model was used to estimate risk ratios for having a medication order, adjusting for demographic, clinical, and facility characteristics. Results: Overall, 83.3% of residents diagnosed with hyperlipidemia had at least one hyperlipidemia medication order. Statins were ordered by 96.2% of active order residents, while other medication classes i.e., omega-3 fatty acids, cholesterol absorption inhibitors, fibrates were less common (

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Dataset Distillation for Classification: Do Distilled Sets Outperform Coresets?

arXiv:2606.18209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dataset distillation (DD) has emerged as a prominent approach in data centric machine learning, aiming to synthesize compact training sets for efficient training by compressing the information in large datasets into a small number of synthetic samples. However, DD methods are often evaluated under inconsistent evaluation protocols, ranging from standard ERM to single/multi-teacher supervision, making it difficult to isolate the effectiveness of distilled data from evaluation. Moreover, many prior methods claim that DD outperforms data pruning approaches such as coreset selection (CS), based on the assumption that restricting condensed datasets to subsets of real samples fundamentally limits their expressiveness. In this work, we critically evaluate DD methods through large-scale experiments using standardized datasets and evaluation protocols to assess their intrinsic effectiveness. We benchmark seven state-of-the-art (SOTA) DD methods on ImageNet-1K, ImageNet100, and ImageNette, using three widely adopted training protocols against three CS strategies. Our results show that while some DD methods fail to outperform even simple random subsets, the SOTA DD approaches are comparable to or worse than coresets on large-scale datasets and incur a substantially higher cost for construction. Beyond accuracy, we also evaluate the representativeness, diversity, and quality of condensed sets, and find that coresets consistently achieve better coverage of the original data distribution. These findings highlight the limited practical advantages of current DD methods and show that coresets remain competitive and are often a more computationally efficient alternative for data-centric learning.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Uncertainty Estimation for Molecular Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.13451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have seen wide adoption for 3D molecular generation, yet they offer no principled signal of when a generated molecule is likely to be of low quality. We propose a post-hoc method for estimating per-sample uncertainty in pretrained molecular diffusion models. Building on a Laplace approximation of the denoising network, we measure the variability of the noise prediction across the generation trajectory. Empirically, we show that the resulting uncertainty score is informative of sample quality, exhibiting a negative correlation with established sample-level quality metrics. We further study how the proposed uncertainty score can be used to filter generated samples, improving model performance via test-time scaling.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On two overlooked stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian process

arXiv:2606.19306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We shed light on two alternative stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian (NIG) random discrete distribution which appear to have been overlooked so far in the Bayesian nonparametric setting. The first is derived from a result in Aldous and Pitman (1998) for the conditional Brownian excursion partition, mixing over the local time at zero up to time one. The second arises as a particular case of a result in James (2013) for priors obtained by a random spatial and temporal change of the normalized generalized Gamma subordinator. Both constructions are in terms of straightforward transformations of standard random variables and can be easily generalized to provide the stick-breaking construction of any element, respectively, in a) the family of mixed Poisson-Kingman models driven by the $1/2$ stable Lévy measure and b) the family of Poisson-Gamma processes driven by the Inverse Gaussian subordinator.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Observable Patterns Are Not Explanations: A Causal-Geometric Analysis of Latent Reasoning Models

Latent reasoning models (LRMs) replace explicit chain-of-thought with continuous thoughts. Recent work treats observable latent-state patterns, such as BFS-like frontiers and decodable arithmetic computation, as evidence for internal reasoning mechanisms. Evaluating two LRMs (Coconut and CODI) against controls lacking the proposed recurrence or curriculum, we find these patterns also appear in the controls and do not always causally affect behavior. Causal interventions reveal that latent-thought utilization is not binary but graded, scaling with a thought's causal effect on model behavior. Geometric analyses reveal this effect concentrates in low-rank directions whose step-to-step geometry grows more structured as their behavioral influence increases. Latent thoughts should therefore be treated as hidden computation, not hidden explanation: decodability, attention, or static structure alone cannot establish mechanism. LRM interpretability thus requires matched controls and causal tests.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Entrainment of cortical gamma oscillations predicts improved bradykinesia and dyskinesia in Parkinson's disease

Background: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is hypothesized to improve motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD) by suppressing pathologically elevated beta activity and promoting "prokinetic" gamma activity in the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop. Advances in bidirectional DBS devices have revealed that stimulation can modify gamma oscillations via subharmonic entrainment, though entrainment's therapeutic role remains unclear. Objectives: To identify stimulation parameters that entrain motor cortical and STN gamma oscillations in PD at rest and during movement, and examine their association with motor function. Methods: Sensorimotor cortex and STN field potentials were collected using a bidirectional DBS system in four subjects with PD over a range of stimulation amplitudes and frequencies. Entrainment amplitude at half the stimulation frequency was quantified at rest and during a finger-tapping task in the ON-medication state. The presence or absence of entrainment was studied as a physiomarker of motor symptom severity. Results: The amplitude of stimulation-entrained gamma oscillations was non-linearly related to stimulation intensity and frequency and varied by stimulation contact choice. Entrainment amplitude was highest in precentral gyrus and increased with movement. In the ON-medication state, precentral gyrus gamma entrainment was associated with reduced bradykinesia, dyskinesia, and dystonia. Subthalamic gamma entrainment predicted improved dystonia but was a less significant marker for motor benefit than cortical entrainment. Conclusions: Stimulation-entrained gamma oscillations in the motor network are a physiomarker for optimal DBS response in PD, and could have a role in physiology-guided DBS programming, complementing existing strategies based on suppression of basal ganglia beta activity.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Exit-and-Join Dynamics for Decentralized Coalition Formation

作者:

arXiv:2606.19683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies coalition formation as a decentralized dynamical process driven by unilateral exit-and-join decisions. Agents evaluate local moves using the Aumann-Dreze value, so payoffs are computed within the agent's current coalition rather than through a globally negotiated coalition structure. The resulting model links cooperative payoff allocation with noncooperative best-response behavior: a terminal partition is precisely a coalition structure with no admissible, individually profitable exit-and-join deviation. We establish equilibrium characterizations, identify conditions under which the dynamics admit scalar Lyapunov or exact-potential representations, and analyze how switching and acceptance costs shape local stability. Numerical experiments test finite-time stabilization, cost sensitivity, and a special convex-game benchmark.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Kerr-induced nonreciprocal transparency and group delay in a hybrid cavity magnomechanical system

arXiv:2606.13412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a scheme for realizing nonreciprocal transparency, Fano resonances, and slow/fast light in a hybrid cavity magnomechanical system containing two YIG spheres and a mechanical resonator. The nonreciprocal behavior originates from the magnon Kerr nonlinearity, which induces direction-dependent frequency shifts and modifies the interference pathways among cavity photons, magnons, and phonons. We show that the hybrid system supports multiple transparency windows arising from magnon- and magnomechanical-induced interference processes. The Kerr interaction strongly reshapes these transparency features, producing asymmetric Fano line shapes and enabling controllable nonreciprocal transmission. Furthermore, the associated dispersion exhibits pronounced directional asymmetry, leading to giant differences in the group delay for opposite propagation directions and allowing reversible switching between slow- and fast-light regimes. We investigate the roles of hybrid coupling strengths and dissipation channels and identify parameter regimes where the nonreciprocal response is maximized. These findings establish Kerr-engineered magnomechanical systems as promising platforms for integrated nonreciprocal microwave photonics and quantum information technologies.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum walk-based optimisation for capacitated vehicle routing with homogeneous and heterogeneous fleets

arXiv:2606.12856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is an appealing candidate for quantum optimisation due to its combinatorial complexity and practical importance. However, the problem's constrained search space poses a challenge for such quantum algorithms. We introduce a quantum walk-based optimisation algorithm (QWOA) for the CVRP with homogeneous or heterogeneous vehicle fleets, addressing this challenge through a continuous-time quantum walk over a product space that coincides with combinatorial structures intrinsic to the CVRP solution space. Relative to the prior QWOA-based formulation, this approach reduces the per-layer gate complexity from $\mathcal{O}(n^{3}\log n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n^{2}\log n)$ and supports a circuit parameterisation schedule generated by a fixed number of classical parameters. Exact state-vector simulation on instances with up to $n=8$ customers and $K=3$ vehicles demonstrates improved convergence to low-cost solutions using markedly fewer objective function evaluations, with the advantage broadening as problem size increases. These results identify structured product-space walks as a promising tool for optimisation over constrained combinatorial spaces.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

LLM-Evolved Domain-Independent Heuristics for Symbolic AI Planning

arXiv:2605.29649v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heuristic search is the dominant paradigm in symbolic AI planning, and the strongest heuristics are the result of decades of work by planning researchers. Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can design heuristics for individual planning domains, but no LLM-generated heuristic has so far worked on arbitrary planning tasks. In this paper, we use evolutionary search to produce the first LLM-generated domain-independent heuristics that exceed the hand-engineered state of the art. We let an LLM mutate parent heuristics written in C++, store candidates in a MAP-Elites archive keyed on informedness and speed and calculate fitness scores by blending coverage with solving time. To place the evolved programs in context, we additionally benchmark a broad set of hand-engineered heuristics on their informedness-speed tradeoff, which to our knowledge has not been done before. On unseen testing domains, our best evolved heuristic solves more tasks than even the strongest baseline, with our full heuristic suite spanning the Pareto frontier of said tradeoff. We also find that seeding evolution from the trivial blind heuristic outperforms seeding from the strong FF heuristic, even when the resulting program is itself an FF variant, and that LLM reasoning effort affects how often candidates compile much more than the quality of those that do. Because the evolved programs are plain C++, they slot into existing planners as drop-in replacements and inherit the soundness and completeness guarantees of the underlying search.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Circuit Tracing in Autoregressive Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.16044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (pLMs) can generate novel protein sequences with properties beyond those observed in nature, yet the mechanisms underlying protein generation remain poorly understood. Existing mechanistic interpretability methods based on sparse autoencoders and transcoders primarily focus on protein representation learning models and do not capture the computation required for autoregressive generation. Here, we introduce ProGenMech, a mechanistic interpretability framework for generative protein language models that extends cross-layer transcoders (CLTs) to ProGen3, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model trained for both causal generation and span infilling. Unlike per-layer approaches, CLTs reconstruct each layer using sparse latent variables from all preceding layers, enabling faithful recovery of inter-layer generative computation. We further develop a zero-shot circuit discovery framework to identify sparse latent circuits responsible for protein generation and fitness prediction. In causal generation and zero-shot fitness estimation tasks, ProGenMech outperforms local transcoder baselines in recovering ProGen3's probability distribution and functional scoring behavior, while matching the original model's generative distribution in span infilling tasks. Moreover, the recovered circuits reveal biologically meaningful motifs and functional regions associated with conserved sequence patterns and protein fitness landscapes, establishing a foundation for interpretable and steerable protein generation.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Generalized Exact Fractional Quantum Information Model with Memory Effects

arXiv:2606.13525v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we analyze quantum information measures in fractional quantum mechanics using the Riemann-Liouville derivative formalism adopted here. In this case, we initially reconsider the conventional definitions of Shannon entropy and Fisher information, subsequently extending them to fractional quantum systems described by nonlocal differential operator frameworks adopted. Within this generalized formulation, fractional expressions of Shannon entropy and Fisher information are constructed and their mathematical structures examined thoroughly. Also, the formalism is then applied to the quantum harmonic oscillator, yielding explicit analytical expressions derived as functions of the fractional parameter therein. The obtained results demonstrate that fractional derivatives alter the localization properties of probability densities and generate nontrivial variations in information content and sensitivity across system behavior. In this context, the fractional parameter plays a central role in controlling deviations from the standard quantum information measures framework. Also, the study establishes a consistent framework for describing information-theoretic properties of quantum systems governed by nonlocal dynamics.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Detectors for Open-Set RF Fingerprinting

arXiv:2606.12718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting systems must operate in open-world environments where signals from unknown transmitters and temporal drift introduce distribution shift at test time. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection provides a natural framework for this problem, yet its application to RF fingerprinting (RFF) remains limited. A key barrier to their adoption is that most OOD detectors require auxiliary OOD data for parameter tuning, an assumption that is difficult to satisfy in RF environments where representative OOD data is impractical to collect. In this work, we introduce a promising set of OOD detection methods from the machine learning literature to open-set RFF domain. We present these methods within a unified mathematical framework based on information theory, which is a natural framework for communication systems. Our framework allows for the systematic analysis of methods and development of new methods. We further demonstrate the applicability of recent work on tuning OOD detectors without given OOD tuning data for open-set RFF. We evaluate on the POWDER RF fingerprinting dataset, showing that detectors tuned without any given OOD data achieve performance comparable to baselines with access to true OOD tuning data and greatly out-perform baseline approaches without access to true OOD tuning data, showcasing the practical viability for the RFF problem.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

UI2Code^N: UI-to-Code Generation as Interactive Visual Optimization

UI-to-code aims to translate UI screenshots into executable front-end code. Despite progress with vision-language models (VLMs), most existing methods formulate UI-to-code as a single-pass generation, which mismatches real-world UI development that is inherently iterative and feedback-driven. We reformulate UI-to-code as an interactive visual optimization problem, where code generation is embedded in a closed-loop process of execution, visual inspection, and iterative refinement driven by rendered visual feedback. To address the non-differentiability of visual objectives and the noise of absolute visual evaluators, we propose Relative Visual Policy Optimization (RVPO), a preference-based reinforcement learning method that optimizes relative visual rankings among rendered candidates under execution feedback. We instantiate this paradigm in UI2Code^N, an open-source 9B model trained via continual pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on UI drafting, UI polishing, and UI editing benchmarks, even outperforming larger models, with performance consistently improving through iterative visual optimization. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/zai-org/UI2Code_N.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Interpretation as Linear Transformation: A Cognitive-Geometric Model of Concepts and Meaning

arXiv:2512.09831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling concepts, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Evaluative concepts are formalized as structured vectors, abstract beings, whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. An abstract being survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, miscommunication, and concept death. Within this framework, I show how conceptual distortion, motivational drift, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result, the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition, characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing conceptual dynamics across heterogeneous agents.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

RoboNaldo: Accurate, Stable and Powerful Humanoid Soccer Shooting via Motion-Guided Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Elite humanoid soccer shooting requires whole-body stability, high-impulse whole-body interactions, and accuracy to targets. Motion tracking-driven reinforcement learning (RL) provides stability in whole-body movement coordination, but a fixed reference makes it hard to adapt to varied ball positions and strike timings; in contrast, task reward-driven RL struggles to explore and discover valid kicks from scratch. We therefore introduce RoboNaldo, a three-stage motion-guided curriculum RL framework for high-impulse humanoid interaction. A single human-kick reference is used as a scaffold and progressively shifts optimization towards shooting performance. The curriculum first learns a stable whole-body kicking prior, then adapts the kick to free-kick settings where the ball is stationary at random positions, and finally extends it to moving-ball shooting through a locomotion-command and kick-trigger interface. A high-level heuristic planner controls this interface during training, while alternative high-level controllers can drive the same low-level policy at inference. In simulation, RoboNaldo demonstrates free-kick shot error 48.6% lower and shoot velocity 2.96x than prior work baselines. In real world on a Unitree G1 with onboard perception, RoboNaldo attains 0.73 m and 0.86 m average target shooting error from 3 m away in free-kick and moving-ball cases, accordingly. And the post-contact ball velocity reaches 13.10 m/s, which is 59-71% of reported professional open-play shot speed. Project page: https://opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Deep-Learning-Based Pixelated Microwave Filter Design and Characterization using Electro-Optical Electric-Field Measurements

arXiv:2606.18402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional microwave filter design typically relies on iterative parameter tuning and predefined topologies, which limits design space and increases development time. This study uses a deep learning approach combining convolutional neural networks with genetic algorithms to automate pixelated microwave filter synthesis. To validate the approach experimentally, both S-parameter and spatial electric-field measurements were analyzed. The synthesized low-pass filter demonstrated excellent agreement between simulated and measured performance, achieving a 7 GHz passband with over 20 dB suppression beyond 9.5 GHz. Electro-optical measurements, for the first time, revealed electric field patterns that resemble coupled transmission-lines or stub structures, providing insight into the emergent characteristics of AI-generated designs.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Impossibility of Eliciting Latent Knowledge

arXiv:2606.12268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advanced AI systems have extensive knowledge of their environments; in fact, their knowledge may (far) exceed that of their developers or users. Consequently, a desirable property for an AI system is that it is honest – that it accurately reports its beliefs about the world. Designing an AI system to be honest may be difficult, especially if we want to ask it questions about latent variables in the environment – variables which are hidden from the human interacting with it. This gives rise to the problem of eliciting latent knowledge (ELK): the problem of training an AI agent to honestly report its beliefs. In this paper, we make ELK formally precise using Causal Influence Diagrams (CIDs). CIDs can be used to describe the relationship between an agent's training environment and its subjective representation of the world. We use CIDs to formalise the distinction between observable and latent variables, to specify what exactly it means for an agent to be honest, and to formally define goal misgeneralisation. We show that, under certain circumstances, developers can incentivise an agent to honestly answer questions by providing correct feedback during training. However, a natural, but undesirable, way for an agent to generalise is to provide answers which humans would evaluate as true, rather than honest answers. We prove an impossibility theorem stating: There is no feedback-based training strategy that depends only on agent behaviour and with certainty produces an honest agent, even if feedback is perfect during training.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Discovering Subgroups with Exceptional Survival Characteristics

arXiv:2602.22179v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In many applications, it is important to identify subpopulations that survive longer or shorter than the rest of the population. In medicine, for example, it allows determining which patients benefit from treatment, and in predictive maintenance, which components are more likely to fail. Existing methods for discovering subgroups with exceptional survival characteristics rely on restrictive assumptions about the survival model (e.g. proportional hazards), require pre-discretized features, and, as they compare average statistics, tend to overlook individual heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose Sysurv, a non-parametric, fully differentiable method that discovers human-readable rules selecting subgroups with exceptional survival characteristics. Empirical evaluation on a wide range of datasets and settings, including a case study on cancer data, shows that Sysurv reveals insightful and actionable survival subgroups, outperforming the state of the art.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Cancer care disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada: A sequential mixed-methods study

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted healthcare delivery worldwide, with cancer care among the most affected services. Prior studies documented delays in referrals, reduced specialist access, and increased provider burden. However, the extent to which these experiences were reflected at the system level remains unclear. Objective To document cancer care experiences and examine whether these experiences were reflected in population-level health system indicators across Ontario, Canada. Methods We used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including patients with cancer (n=8), caregivers (n=5), healthcare providers (n=14), and decision-makers (n=5) across two hospital settings in Ontario, Canada. Emergent themes informed the development of quantitative indicators. We then conducted a retrospective population-based analysis of linked administrative health databases for cancer patients in Ontario (n=87,786) to assess the prevalence of identified themes. Results Four themes emerged: (I) delays in diagnosis and screening; (II) disrupted access to primary care; (III) barriers to specialist and mental health services; and (IV) fragmented care for patients with multimorbidity. Quantitative findings corroborated major themes. Screening rates declined for cervical (64.8% to 57.5%) and breast cancer (64.5% to 57.2%). While in-person primary care shifted almost entirely to virtual modalities (8.5% to 95.4%), overall visit volumes remained stable. Specialist care showed uneven patterns, with increased oncology visits but declines in cardiology and mental health services. Patients with multiple comorbidities experienced the largest reductions in non-oncology specialist care. Conclusion The pandemic disrupted key components of cancer care, particularly screening, access to certain specialist services, and care for patients with complex needs. Integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights areas of system vulnerability and underscores the need for coordinated, resilient cancer care capable of maintaining essential services during future crises.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Aligning Implied Statements for Implicit Hate Speech Generalizability with Context-Bounded Semi-hard Negative Mining

Classifying implicit hate speech remains a challenge, as intent is often masked through insinuation and context rather than explicit slurs. Prior supervised contrastive approaches improve in-domain detection but can overfit surface cues and struggle to transfer across datasets. We propose ImpSH, a triplet-based framework that aligns posts with implied statements when available and uses context-bounded semi-hard negatives to focus learning on near confusions. We also examine AugSH, which forms positives via data augmentation. In controlled evaluations on IHC, SBIC, and DynaHate with BERT and HateBERT, ImpSH is a viable alternative to standard supervised contrastive baselines and often improves cross-domain performance under matched preprocessing and tuning budgets. Representation analysis using alignment and uniformity indicates tighter positive pairs with balanced global spread, and qualitative nearest-neighbor case studies illustrate typical false negatives under domain shift. These results demonstrate that aligning posts with their implied statements via context-bounded mining provides a more stable, bijective-like mapping to related insinuations, overcoming the volatility inherent in traditional clustering-based representation learning.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

On the Reliability of Cue Conflict and Beyond

Understanding how neural networks rely on visual cues offers a human-interpretable view of their internal decision processes. The cue-conflict benchmark has been influential in probing shape-texture preference and in motivating the insight that stronger, human-like shape bias is often associated with improved in-domain performance. However, we find that the current stylization-based instantiation can yield unstable and ambiguous bias estimates. Specifically, stylization may not reliably instantiate perceptually valid and separable cues nor control their relative informativeness, ratio-based bias can obscure absolute cue sensitivity, and restricting evaluation to preselected classes can distort model predictions by ignoring the full decision space. Together, these factors can confound preference with cue validity, cue balance, and recognizability artifacts. We introduce REFINED-BIAS, an integrated dataset and evaluation framework for reliable and interpretable shape-texture bias diagnosis. REFINED-BIAS constructs balanced, human- and model- recognizable cue pairs using explicit definitions of shape and texture, and measures cue-specific sensitivity over the full label space via a ranking-based metric, enabling fairer cross-model comparisons. Across diverse training regimes and architectures, REFINED-BIAS enables fairer cross-model comparison, more faithful diagnosis of shape and texture biases, and clearer empirical conclusions, resolving inconsistencies that prior cue-conflict evaluations could not reliably disambiguate.